I’ve been reading and summarizing old vomits over the past few days.
I think the important realization is that I’ve really written probably 90 to 95% of everything I need to say or know about the way my mind works, with regards to addressing the challenge that’s defined my life so far. How to be my own master, how to regulate myself, how to achieve my own goals. How to earn self-respect, how to become someone I can be proud of. How to get what I want, at least right now.
So that makes my life a little easier, it allows me to breathe a little easier. I mean, I already sort of guessed this– it was a prominent thought on my mind, which was why I finally sat down and started doing the reading and summarizing– but the actual reading is confirming what I had suspected.
So theoretically, if I just do all the reading (and I don’t want to do it all at once such that it distracts from my work– rather, I do a little bit every day– technically a summary a day is 10,000 words of reading, but I read pretty quick because it’s my own words and stuff that I’ve said and thought over and over again), I should be able to synthesize, compress and summarize everything in a way that’s useful to me. I don’t want to fall into the trap of thinking I’m going to be able to a do a single magical blogpost that achieves everything perfectly. Rather, I need to do little attempts that will probably fail, and then repeat those attempts. Remix them. All the building blocks are already on the floor, I’ve already emptied them out. Now I need to identify what they are, sort them into piles, and see what I can build with them. The end result will be a refactored mind, which will give me some peace and quiet. A stable base from which to grow.
I went for a run earlier today, which was good. I feel the endorphins clearing out my mind. When I’m done with this vomit I’m going to sleep. I’d be in bed with the lights out before 11pm. That’s a new thing for me. That’s great. I’d like to sleep and wake up early every day. My wife is out of town right now, so I have a month to myself where I’m really fully in control of my own schedule and my own environment. So I really have no excuse. And I don’t want to look for an excuse. I want to take charge. I want this month to be the best month of my life so far. And I believe in myself, I believe that I have the power to make it so. I’ve spent the past 6 weeks being reasonably effective at work. That’s a simple system that works for me, now I’m going to build upon that system.
I’m getting tired and sleepy, which is good. But I still have half a vomit to go.
I guess I’ll take a few minutes to play with random things. Improv time!
I was listening to “sleep music delta waves” on YouTube, and now I’m listening to Sadhguru talking about stress and the renouncement of life. And I find myself thinking, it’s so hard for me to stick to any particular ideology. I’ve read a bunch of different things, and completely different things– polar opposites– have resonated with me before, equally well.
Eat the flesh and spit the bones, I guess. I wonder if all these random things I’ve read and thought about will ever converge into some sort of coherent whole, or if I’m going to flit from thing to thing. I think it’s important to try and synthesize things. A couple of vomits ago I wrote about something parallel to what I read from “Adulthood is a scary horse” on Captain Awkward– about how, if we’re feeling stressed and underperforming and burnt out, or just inefficient, weak, useless– it’s important to reconcile two very different things. One is that you need to be kind to yourself, and the other is that you need to work hard. You can’t be harsh on yourself, that’s counterproductive. At the same time, in the process of being kind to yourself, you can’t ignore the fact that you need to do some really hard work. Oftentimes, I find myself flitting from one to the other.
And it seems like it’s hard to progress without embodying both at the same time. There’s a certain yin-yang element to it, or it’s like putting pressure on something from two separate points. If I have just one or the other, it sort of deflates or fizzles out.
Similarly I wonder if that’s to be the case with all other things– individualism and socialism, being inward and outward. I’m reading The Fountainhead now, and I appreciate it for the idea that it puts forward. I wonder if I would be a different person today if I had encountered it when I was younger. I wonder how my younger self would’ve interpreted it and its ideas. Would I have been crazy about it? I don’t feel like it. I read too much as a kid to be too crazy about any one particular book. What book was I most crazy about when I was younger? I think 48 Laws Of Power was my first “truly eye-opening” book, and it’s not like it turned me into some sort of scheming Machiavellian. It just made me more conscious of how easy it is to hurt and offend people without realizing, without intending. It made me realize how we can help and serve people instead of attacking them.
Eat the flesh, spit the bones.
Well, I’m pretty much dry for now, given the paltry amount of words left and my current state of mind. The best thing I can do is to just run this one out and go to bed, and I’ll write more tomorrow. I’m actually looking forward more to the summaries. The writing will be secondary, at least until all the summaries are done, or I encounter something in the summaries that makes me want to write something specific. Adios~